Category Archives: Technology

Note: This postgrew out of an email exchange with colleagues who voiced legitimate questions and concerns about whether makerspaces were an appropriate choice for their library system. The following is my slightly edited (for grammar and clarity) response.

Colleagues,

The DIY Revolution Starts Now

I agree with you that having a “makerspace” (i.e. designating a specific space to be used only for maker programming) may not be a good choice for a library system, or for any individual branch, due to the great demands on available space. I also agree that it is likely that many current library users are not actively requesting a makerspace.

Putting the idea of makerspaces aside for a moment, I believe that the world is changing at a rapid pace, that the pace of change itself is accelerating, and that it is increasingly true that “what got us here, won’t get us there.” Our core principles and values and mission don’t change, but the techniques and forms we use to bring life to our mission and principles can and must change if we are to be sustained as a funded and relevant organization in the future.

The world is changing, not only rapidly, but at an increasingly accelerated pace. The only way for libraries — or any organizations — are going to remain relevant and sustainable is by developing a habit of continually asking and answering these questions:

What world are we living in?

What impact do we want to be having for our customers and community?

What is most important — what should we be focusing our time, energy and resources on — today?

Another way of putting it is, how do we maximize our limited resources to engage our customers in ways that:

Are aligned with our mission?

Are meaningful and valuable to our customers?

Build on and reinforce the value of libraries to customers and stakeholders?

Get The Mission Right

You’ll notice that the key here is being clear about what our mission is. If we don’t know that, it’s difficult to align our energies and make decisions about resource allocations. While it continues to be generally true that the brand of libraries, as perceived by our customers, is BOOKS, and to a lesser extent INFORMATION , I’d like to suggest that BOOKS is not our mission. INFORMATION is not our mission And neither books nor information are hooks upon which we want to hang the hat of our future sustainability. All of over the country libraries are finding themselves in battles — not just for funding, but for their very existence — precisely because organized opposition says, “What do we need libraries for anymore – we have kindles, we have amazon prime, we have netflix, we have wikipedia.” Those messages resonate, and libraries are finding themselves caught by surprise, having their budgets slashed. “What happened?” They’re asking themselves. “People were coming in the doors. They loved us. They loved reading. What happened?”

What happened is these libraries mistook their loyal book-loving customers as broad-based support. (Side note – The 2008 OCLC “From Awareness to Funding” report strongly suggested that library use does not correlate with library support.) What happened was these libraries thought – and even proclaimed — that their mission was books and information. And the public believed them — and then defunded them because the community didn’t see a need for publicly funded books and information.

So it is important to me that we get the mission right, because the choices we make, and our ability to continue in the long term to make a positive impact in the lives of our customers is riding on it. We’re in the process of having these conversations, and we’ll continue that process in the October GM2 meeting.

I’d offer that the mission of libraries is not books (which is a format, a form) or even information, but learning, self-directed exploration and growth, early literacy, stimulation of imagination and curiosity, strengthening of community and civic connections, job readiness and economic development. Any given library might focus on any one of these elements more than others, and perhaps there are elements beyond the ones listed.

Now. If our mission is about learning, literacy, and community connections, we can ask ourselves: In the world we live in today, 2015 (almost), how do we direct resources and align energies to best help people learn? What does the best research say about how people learn? What about literacy? Literacy has traditionally focused on the printed word. Should we be looking at technological literacy? Literacy after all is a competency, and one that libraries support because traditionally it is the most important competency for people to be active participants in our democracy, and to be functional and productive members in our economy. Are there other competencies that are becoming more important in the 21st century? Many suggest that collaboration, critical thinking, experimental mindset, and self-direction are the important competencies for the 21st century economy. If that’s true, how do we best support children and adults so they have the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in the world and in the economy of 2015 and 2020 and beyond?

The maker movement has the opportunity to transform education by inviting students to be something other than consumers of education. They can become makers and creators of their own educational lives, moving from being directed to do something to becoming self-directed and independent learners. Increasingly, they can take advantage of new tools for creative expression and for exploring the real world around them. They can be active participants in constructing a new kind of education for the 21st-century, which will promote the creativity and critical thinking we say we value in people like Steve Jobs.

It’s Not Necessarily About “Makerspaces” It’s About Learning and Connection

I suggest that we not talk about “makerspaces” per se — since space is at a premium, and it can be difficult to carve out too much space to be permanently used for maker activities. But that’s a bit of a red herring. Let’s talk about whether there is value in supporting the maker concept. Is there value in the maker philosophy of learning through doing; of moving from a teaching philosophy that says, “we have buckets of information, we shall pour them into your passively waiting brain” to a learning philosophy that says, “Here is a platform to support your curiosity, your wonder, and your exploration. Here is a member of the community to mentor you. Together we will explore, learn, and share, through trying, doing, failing, and creating.” Is there value in the maker philosophy of bringing in community members, cross-demographic and cross-generational, to mentor and support each other? Do these things align with our mission and values? And if so, can we find ways of using our existing spaces more flexibly and adapt them to different needs at different times? Should we find ways to fund maker activities, whether through reallocation of funds or identification of new funds through grants or partnerships? I think we should.

We Need To Do More Than Respond to Customer Needs

One last point. Meeting our customer’s needs and being responsive to what they ask for is clearly important. However, being responsive to requests is only part of the equation. In my experience, whether or not a customer is asking for a specific service or product is not always a good indication of whether they will value it once it is offered. Who was asking for an OPAC before we had one? Who asked for networked computers? Who asked for the Internet? If we go back far enough we could probably ask, “Who asked for storytimes?” In my nine years of programming continuing education classes for a multitype library cooperative, the most popular classes — the ones where registration filled within the first hour — were CONSISTENTLY the ones that no one asked for; classes on topics such as Twitter, social bookmarking, blogging, effective presentations, etc. People asked for advanced excel classes, book repair, Reader’s Advisory, and these classes would get low to middling turnout.

I learned that what people ask for is constrained by the limits of their own imagination and expectations, and that while it was important for me to be responsive, it was often more valuable to my customers to pay attention to trends and anticipate the class/offering that they didn’t even think to ask for.

We Need To Shift Customer Expectations

I believe the same principle applies generally to library services. Our customers have an expectation or a perception of what a library is and what we could or should be offering. It is our responsibility to add value to their lives by anticipating things we could be doing, aligned with our mission, that will surprise and delight them. Our job is to help shift their perceptions and expectations about what a library is or could be in their lives, and in the lives of their family and community. And in shifting those perceptions we simultaneously deliver on the promise of our mission while also positioning the library as an indispensable presence in the community, and strengthening our position with our funders, and improving the long-term sustainability of the organization.

We’re doing a repeat performance next Thursday (and then Barbequing at Chateau Bromber’) so if anyone has any recommendations or feedback to improve my RSS presentation I’m all ears. Grilling tips are also appreciated.

I am a participant in the workshop, and I see the conversation that’s playing out as one big, (public) demonstration of the power and value of L20. There are both positive and negative examples for us to learn from here. My working group in L20 Bootcamp has been charged with answering the question: “How can Library 2.0 be used to enhance [ALA] membership?” What follows is my response.

First, a few thoughts:

I understand the Otter Group’s motivation to defend themselves against perceived attacks. I believe they set out to do good with this workshop. I’ll grant that their motivations are pure. I imagine they must be feeling a bit like “no good deed goes unpunished.” Having said that, I think their evolving response to the criticisms being levied at them could have been plucked whole-cloth from the ClueTrain Manifesto, under the heading, “What not to do” or “Example of corporation 1.0 in its’ death throes.” That is to say, while running a course that is, at its heart, about having conversations, they are investing time and energy and (allegedly) using the language of intimidation and threats of legal action to stamp out conversation because they don’t like what’s being said.

This is great!!! It’s great because it offers us a real-time, unfolding case-study, ripe with lessons we can sink our teeth into. I do not see this as a simple case of the big bad corporation versus the noble defenders of good. It’s a little more nuanced than that (most things are, right?). To the extent that we can resist our impulses to cast this as a drama of good v. evil, we can extract some useful lessons.

That I am getting value from my Bootcamp experience and the conversations that have sprung up around it is unquestionable. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that ALA is doing anything is a huge overriding value. I’m aware that much of the value I’m extracting as a participant is because of Otter’s (and Jenny Levine’s and Michael Stephens’) contributions. And some of it is in spite of their contributions. Right now people are talking about the “in spite” part. That’s ok. That’s natural. That’s healthy. But it’s not the whole story. What follows is my attempt to frame what I’m seeing, hearing, reading, and experiencing in a way that will help me learn and extract value from this experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

El Tuo’s L20 Manifesto: (Thoughts on using L20 to enhance membership in ALA

L20 is a conversation.

Don’t try to put the conversation in a box.

Conversations do not occur in boxes.

Conversations are organic. They go where they go. They grow where they grow.

The further a conversation goes the better. The wider it grows the better.

Go where the conversation goes or you will cease to be a part of it.

No one controls the conversation.

If you try to control the conversation, it will affect how others perceive you in spite of anything or everything else you are doing.

If you try to control the conversation, you will lose credibility (at best).

Credibility is the coin of the web 2.0 realm.

If you try to control the conversation, you will ignite and draw peoples’ anger or ridicule or both (if you’re lucky).

Your response to anger and ridicule can be a part of the conversation or separate from it, in which case it is simply prologue to your epitaph.

If you try to control the conversation you will be ignored as irrelevant (at worst).

Irrelevance is worse than death. People say nice things about the dead, but the irrelevant are seldom mentioned.

Anyone can participate in the conversation.

We add value by participating in the conversation.

It is the quality of our participation, not the quantity, that determines how much value we bring to the conversation.

We extract value by listening to the conversation.

The best listeners extract the most value.

The organization that listens best extracts the most value.

Organizations can’t just listen… They must participate.

ALL feedback is good.

Conversations flourish when ALL feedback is seen as good.

All feedback is useful.

Conversations flourish when ALL feedback is seen as useful.

The appropriate response to feedback is to say thank you.

Find another way to say thank you.

Repeat.

Now offer a thoughtful response to feedback.

Congratulations, we are now having a conversation.

(This manifesto has been cross-posted to: http://eltuo.pbwiki.com/ I encourage fellow boot camp participants and anyone else interested in growing the manifesto to jump in and edit. The pwd is eltuo.)

Kevin Kelly’s NY Times Magazine article, Scan This Book, blew my mind. I read it straight through on Sunday and have re-read selected snippets a few times trying to wrap my mind around the implications. Here are a few selections that really jumped out at me (with my comments if I rally the brain cells to assist me.)

Kelly writes,

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click “votes” on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.

Mind blow the first: Simply by clicking on a link we are affecting the order the of the web. What seems to be a “read” action, turns out to be more of a “read/write” action. The more we click on something, the more likely it becomes that someone else will find it and click on it.

Kelly writes,

Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or “playlists,” as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these “bookshelves” will be published and swapped in the public commons. Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

Mind blow the second: Individual enthusiasts writing, selecting, “curating”, mashing, may soon be on an equal footing with the “experts.” I can already see this happening with wikis and blogs. The truth is, I now get almost zero useful information from our professional literature (It takes me about 10 minutes to read American Libraries and/or LJ.) But I get an immense amount of useful and stimulating information –information that is helping me do my job better– from a number of library and marketing blogs that I read regularly with the the help of RSS. (So how long before we hear, “Dude, have you heard my mashup of Federalist #51 and the new Neil Young album? Publius rocks!!)

And there’s more. A lot more.

The sorry state of our copyright law, and the black hole of out-of-print information it has created (sucking, sucking, sucking information away from the public domain.)

The fact that a large % of out-of-print info can’t be put back into print because, well, because no one even knows who owns the copyrights.

The possibility that Google can bring much of this “lost” information back into play by scanning and indexing it, thereby shifting the onus to copyright holders to exert claims (if they have them.)

The filtering power of hyperlinks and tags to bring items that exist out on the long tail to peoples’ attention. (think: If you like Ryan Adams, you may like the Jayhawks, and if you like the Jayhawks you may like, Uncle Tupelo, and if like Uncle Tupelo, you may like Calexico, and if you like Calexico you may like Giant Sand, and if you like Giant Sand, you may like their album Glum (and that’s about as long tail as it gets.)

I’ll be re-reading this piece, and reading other blogger’s thoughts on it, trying to flesh out and extrapolate what it all means for libraries. It occurs to me that the Overdrive audiobooks platform already allows us to add our own pdf and audio content to the collection. Will librarians soon be performing more local collection development of digital formats?

The possibilities (and challenges) of adding exponentially more community created content (like Atlantic City’s teen poetry slam, or flickr photo sets, or autobiographies) as permanent additions to the collection is intriguing!